In my forays into the history of medicine I came across these six little words by Hippocrates.
They seem strangely modern, almost like something you might find on a Hallmark-card for today’s medical school graduates. I don’t know how old the translation is and I couldn’t understand the original text if I tried – but these simple words really touched me when I ...

"Doctor Pete" was fifty-one when I started my residency in family medicine. "Family practice" we called it then, and I think I liked that name of our specialty better. It implies continued learning and brings to my mind visions of practicing a down-to-earth craft.
I had interviewed with his predecessor the summer before and was really impressed with him and the program. I ranked it as my first choice in the ...

New medicines are like new fashions in clothing. They are introduced with great fanfare. Most turn out to seem fairly ordinary after a few years. Some are quickly forgotten or discarded and make us say: “What was I thinking?”
Evaluating a new drug is difficult, for the pharmaceutical and scientific communities as well as for us clinicians. It often takes years of general use before a drug can really prove its ...

We often speak of the importance of continuity of care, but there is confusion about what this really means.
When I first joined our small clinic twenty-five years ago, continuity was the reason every medical group in the five town area had its own night-call roster. This way, patients who called after hours could reach a doctor from their own doctor’s office. Even if the covering physician didn’t know the patient, ...

Psychotherapy appointments have traditionally lasted 50 minutes with 10 minutes for paperwork. This has lead to the expression, “the 50-minute hour”.

More recently there has been talk of incorporating psychotherapy techniques in brief visits in primary care. The provoking title “The Fifteen Minute Hour” is from a book about addressing the emotional aspects of disease in primary care during brief appointments. The title and the concept seem relevant to much of ...

One of my medical school professors was an internationally renowned subspecialist, whose ward occupied the entire top floor of the medical tower at Academy Hospital in Uppsala.
He had cadres of residents working for him, and for two glorious months I rotated through his ward as part of my internal medicine training in medical school.
One thing that stands out in my memory, to this day, from those two months is how ...

I used to get frustrated when patients, typically at the very end of a long visit for some other serious problem, would utter one-liners like “What can I take for headaches?” “How do I know if I have cancer?” or “Why can’t I lose weight?”
Now I have a one-liner, of sorts, myself in response to those types of questions. I usually lean back slightly, widen my eyes, nod and say:
“Now, ...

A primary care resident wrote in one of the journals recently about making the limited time she has with each patient matter the most.
How refreshing, I thought when she concluded that time ultimately is an absolute and finite resource. We often feel as if we are battling time as much as we are battling disease, and we sometimes have trouble admitting when we are losing either one of those battles. ...

Health care in the United States is struggling to redefine itself. We have been spending twice what other countries spend on health care, yet our citizens are less healthy. We now have legislation to create more or less universal insurance coverage, and we are about to embark on a technology-driven quest for quality and uniformity. At the same time, Americans are increasingly turning to alternative health care practitioners, mostly at ...

In family medicine it has been common to keep a “Problem List” in patients’ paper charts. Usually placed on the left hand side, on top of the Medication List, it has given doctors like me an instant thumbnail sketch before considering the specifics of each patient’s visit for that day.
A typical Problem List would include diagnoses like diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol or rheumatoid arthritis. It would list prior surgeries, like ...